The only stat that matters for Notre Dame Football

http://www.cfbstats.com/2011/leader/national/team/offense/split01/category12/sort02.html

Change this stat and the rest will follow.

Relevant excerpt:

	Name	G	Fum. Gain	Int. Gain	Total Gain	Fum. Lost	Int. Lost	Total Lost	Margin	Margin/G
1	Rutgers	2	4	5	9	0	1	1	8	4.00
2	Cincinnati	2	5	2	7	0	0	0	7	3.50
3	South Florida	2	5	3	8	0	2	2	6	3.00
4	Michigan	2	5	3	8	0	3	3	5	2.50
4	North Carolina State	2	3	5	8	2	1	3	5	2.50
4	Toledo	2	4	2	6	0	1	1	5	2.50
4	Washington	2	3	3	6	0	1	1	5	2.50
4	Temple	2	2	4	6	1	0	1	5	2.50
9	Vanderbilt	2	2	5	7	1	2	3	4	2.00
9	Marshall	2	3	3	6	0	2	2	4	2.00
9	Illinois	2	2	3	5	1	0	1	4	2.00
9	Utah	2	2	3	5	1	0	1	4	2.00
9	San Diego State	2	4	0	4	0	0	0	4	2.00
	...
107	Western Kentucky	2	3	3	6	3	6	9	-3	-1.50
107	Louisville	2	0	3	3	4	2	6	-3	-1.50
107	Arkansas State	2	2	0	2	3	2	5	-3	-1.50
107	San Jose State	2	2	0	2	3	2	5	-3	-1.50
107	SMU	2	1	1	2	2	3	5	-3	-1.50
107	Kansas State	1	0	2	2	4	1	5	-3	-3.00
107	Miami (Florida)	1	0	1	1	2	2	4	-3	-3.00
107	Nevada	1	0	0	0	0	3	3	-3	-3.00
115	Western Michigan	2	1	2	3	4	3	7	-4	-2.00
115	Army	2	1	1	2	5	1	6	-4	-2.00
117	Iowa State	2	2	0	2	4	3	7	-5	-2.50
118	Southern Mississippi	2	0	2	2	4	4	8	-6	-3.00
118	North Carolina	2	0	0	0	2	4	6	-6	-3.00
120	Notre Dame	2	0	3	3	5	5	10	-7	-3.50

Vegas Preliminaries

I finally found a site offering some historical gambling data (thought not as much as I'd like).  For those of you too lazy to click, this is the key thing:

Straight Up Trends (Won Loss Tie)

Category	Record	Percent
Away Teams	11-67-0	14.10%
Home Teams	67-11-0	85.90%
Favorites	70-8-0	89.74%
Dogs	8-70-0	10.26%
Away Favorites	5-2-0	71.43%
Away Dogs	6-65-0	8.45%
Home Favorites	65-6-0	91.55%
Home Dogs	2-5-0	28.57%

So I'm still getting my head around the way this works, but at a glance it looks like the picked favorites do well, and that this week betting on the home team was a good call.  Not surprising for opening week I guess.  It'll be interesting to see what happens with these going forward.  As a sidenote, I also found a site doing comprehensive statistics on college football.  I suspect we'll be seeing some comparisons between Notre Dame and the general field in this blog's future.

Vegas Odds versus NCAA rankings

NCAA rankings are stupid and no one likes them, but that's okay because the people using them don't have any skin in the game.  What I want to know is whether or not Vegas does a better job of predicting the outcome of matchups than the NCAA rankings.  So I'm currently rooting around for historical Vegas Odds and going forward this season we'll be taking the vegas odds and NCAA rankings before each ND game to see which is better (if they differ).  I might end up choosing more teams if ND isn't terribly interesting, but this is the plan.

What is a Sport?

Here is an exceedingly narrow definition sure to provoke some arguments:

A sport is a contest of physical prowess characterized by scoring with symmetrical objectives, offense and defense, with the purpose of entertainment.  This excludes all marksmanship events, races, and indirect competitions.  Track and field, golf, basically anything you can have a world record for doesn't count because if defense was meaningfully part of the competition, we wouldn't be able to compare achievements.

The Skurtz promise

In the interest of increasing my readership by exactly one person, I have agreed to make every other blog post about sports as long as my friend Skurtz reads the blog.  I will be testing him regularly, so if there is a sudden drop off in sports posts, you'll know why.